Omeros

Category: Book
By (author): Walcott, Derek
Subject:  LITERARY CRITICISM / American / African American
  POETRY / Caribbean & Latin American
  POETRY / Epic
  POETRY / General
Audience: general/trade
Awards: Nobel Prize For Literature (1992)
Nobel Prize in Literature (1992) Winner
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: June 1992
Format: Book-paperback
Pages: 336
Size: 8.30in x 5.76in x 0.96in
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Additional Notes

From The Publisher*

Omeros is the grand epic poem told in multiple chapters from Nobel Prize-winning poet and playwright Derek Walcott.

With circular narrative design, titled with the Greek name for Homer, Omeros simultaneously charts two currents of history: the visible history charted in events--the tribal losses of the American Indian, the tragedy of African enslavement--and the interior, unwritten epic fashioned from the suffering of the individual in exile.

"One of the great poems of our time." -John Lucas, New Statesman

From The Publisher*A poem of circular narrative design, titled with the Greek name for Homer, which simultaneously charts two currents of history: the visible history charted in events -- the tribal losses of the American Indian, the tragedy of African enslavement -- and the interior, unwritten epic fashioned from the suffering of the individual in exile.
Review Quote*

"No poet rivals Mr. Walcott in humor, emotional depth, lavish inventiveness in language, or the ability to express the thoughts of his characters and compel the reader to follow the swift mutations of ideas and images in their minds. This wonderful story moves in a spiral, replicating human thought, and in the end, surprisingly, it makes us realize that history, all of it, belongs to us." -Mary Lefkowitz, The New York Times Book Review (an Editors' Choice/Best Book of 1990 selection)

"Characters come fully and movingly to life in Walcott's hands; black and white are treated with equal understanding and sympathy as they go their complicated ways . . . Wit and verbal play . . . enliven every page of this extraordinary poem . . . A constant source of surprise and delight from stanza to stanza, a music so subtle, so varied, so exquisitely right that it never once, in more than eight thousand lines, strikes a false note." -Bernard Knox, The New York Review of Books

"One of the great poems of our time." -John Lucas, New Statesman and Society

Biographical NoteDerek Walcott (1930-2017) was born in St. Lucia, the West Indies, in 1930. His Collected Poems: 1948-1984 was published in 1986, and his subsequent works include a book-length poem, Omeros (1990); a collection of verse, The Bounty (1997); and, in an edition illustrated with his own paintings, the long poem Tiepolo's Hound (2000). His numerous plays include The Haitian Trilogy (2001) and Walker and The Ghost Dance (2002). Walcott received the Queen's Medal for Poetry in 1988 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992.